The convergence of direct pen input devices, full text indexing of personal stores, and Internet search engines offers tremendous unexplored opportunities to design fluid user interfaces for active note taking. Active note taking can be considered to be, for example, the combination of pen-and-ink note taking with searching, linking, collecting, and sensemaking activities. This is in contrast to simple note taking, which is characterized by moment-to-moment transcription. Active note taking for example is typically performed by knowledge workers engaged in challenging creative work such as scientific research, product design, or planning complex activities, and the like. The knowledge workers often create informal pre-production work artifacts on paper, in notebooks, or on whiteboards, sketching preliminary plans and manipulating their notes to find solutions to difficult problems.
Further it has been observed that people tend to surround themselves with “task detritus” to help trigger extensions, variations, and associations on ideas. For example, messy physical desks subtly structure information and remind users of work to do; virtual 3D desktops enable users to create personally meaningful spatial arrangements by piling together document thumbnails. An unstructured notebook page is also effective in this regard as it imposes no formalism, thus allowing users to manipulate spatial arrangements of information to assist in sensemaking tasks and activities.